Berkshire Hathaway: Warren Buffet Controls $334 Billion in Cash

Berkshire Hathaway’s cash pile reached a record $334.02 billion in 2024, thanks to Warren Buffett’s stock sales and the billions of dollars in interest earned from the company’s enormous Treasury bill holdings.

Omaha-based Berkshire announced on Saturday that while Buffett reduced his holdings in blue-chip US stocks, including multibillion-dollar sales of shares in Citigroup and Bank of America, the company’s cash position increased by $9 billion in the last three months of last year.

The group’s cash reserves have nearly doubled in the last 12 months. In 2024, the expansive conglomerate reported operating earnings of $47.4 billion, a 27% increase from 2023, driven primarily by a more robust insurance business.

The operating results do not include fluctuations in the value of Berkshire’s $272 billion stock portfolio, which Buffett has long disregarded as being essentially pointless.

Berkshire sold $143 billion worth of stocks in 2024, far more than the $9 billion it invested in stocks, and used a large portion of the proceeds to buy short-term Treasury bills

Buffett wrote to shareholders, “Berkshire did better than I expected in 2024, even though 53 percent of our 189 operating businesses reported a decline in earnings.”. We significantly expanded our holdings of these extremely liquid short-term securities, and the improvement in Treasury Bill yields helped us with a predictable large gain in investment income. “.